Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE)

Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE) is a joint institute between the University Pompeu Fabra (UPF) and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) which was created in 2008 in Barcelona. It is currently growing to become an international reference in the field, with plans to host 40-50 groups doing research in evolution. Researchers at IBE study the processes and mechanisms that generate biodiversity, including topics such as genetic and molecular evolution, population biology, complex systems biology and the recovery of ancient DNA.

www.ibe.upf-csic.es

Excellence and recognition awards

IBE has a successful external funding record:

4 European Research Council (ERC) grants
8 Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) awardees

Ranking positioning

2014 – 2^nd worldwide position in the evolutionary biology sector, in terms of excellence and the Q1 – ratio of publications indicators in the 2014 Scimago Institutions Ranking report. At the global, international and size-independent ranking, IBE is situated in the position number 282.

Director of the center

Tomas Marques

Tomas Marques is the director of the IBE and Principal Investigator of the Comparative Genomics group. He started his own laboratory in 2011 after a Marie Curie fellowship (2008) in Seattle, University of Washington. In 2011 he obtained the competitive ERC Starting Grant 2010 and in 2011, he was selected as an ICREA research investigator at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF). In 2013, he was also selected for the EMBO young Investigator award and associate editor for BMC Genomics. In 2014, he was also appointed head of the comparative genomics group at CRG-CNAG. He is part of the executive committee of the G10K and the Dog G10K, two international efforts to sequence 10,000 vertebrates to study genome evolution and 10,000 dog genomes. He has trained 5 PhD students and 3 postdocs, all of them working actively in the academia in UK and USA.